betwixt the country and the king. The struggle was about to be resumed, and with greater energy than ever, between general and privileged interests, between the friends of the charter and the instruments of oppression, between the principle of good and the principle of evil. The faction, which had been conquered at the late elections which had found itself opposed and crushed by the immense majority of the nationwhich represented the opinions of another age-devoted to despotism, if despotism was only placed in its own hands-had been again intrusted with power, and that power they were to employ against the growing intelligence, and undoubted rights, of the community. It was good that matters had been carried so far, that the Court had taken so decided a part, and had thereby marked out so distinctly the position which the country ought to assume. In the presence of such men, every one immediately knew what he ought to do; and even the most yielding conscience would no longer be able to discover any pretext or excuse for refusing to resist The ministry would find its supporters among all who had been most distinguished for their hatred of public opinion, and free institutions; amid their flatteries it might live on during the recess of the Chambers; but the convocation of the legislature would terminate its power. As if the dreaded influence of the new Cabinet on the internal state of the country had not been sufficient to arouse public detestation, the change was represented as having been the result of an intrigue of the English government. The ministry was called the Wellington Ministry; and

the motive, which induced our government thus to impose on France an anti-national Cabinet, was said to be, a desire to see her under a ministry which would take less interest in the affairs of the East, and would not favour the designs of Russia by extending the liberties, or the territories of Greece. Such a charge, which had no countenance, except in the fact of Prince Polignac having been ambassador in London, was useful to the party who made it; for the Cabinet was so universally hated, that no accusation was too gross to be believed; but if they believed it themselves, it was only a proof of the credulity of passion; for there was no reason to believe that the English ministry had ever troubled itself about the matter.

To the opposition, founded on the knowledge of the general principles of the new ministers, were added, in some instances, grounds of peculiar and personal dislike. Prince Polignac himself was unpopular, as being an adherent of the Congregation, and of Court politics; he was not highly respected on account of his capacity; but he was not supposed to be addicted to violent measures. Courvoisier, the Keeper of the Seals, had been distinguished in the Chambers for nothing but his vaccillations; in his official situation, as Procureur-general, he had been a lover of prosecutions against the press; he had now given himself up devotedly to the Jesuits and the Congregation. Montbel, the new minister of Public Instruction, and grand-master of the University, was still more unpopular. He was merely the creature, and had been the faithful adherent, of Villèle and Peyronnet, and the latter were now said to sit in the Cabinet by their

proxy. All these nominations, however, much as they were disliked, were treated as indifferent, in comparison with the nomination of Labourdonnaye to the ministry of the Interior, and of general Bourmont to that of War. The former was a well-known leader of the ultra opposition. The element, in which he lived, and moved, and had his being, was faction. The violence of his antipathies was only equalled by the insatiable cravings of his ambition, and the ungovernable fury of his temper. Though his principles led him to support the royal authority against popular rights, his pride and wounded selflove drove him into the most uncompromising opposition to the royalist ministry of M. de Villèle. On the change of Cabinet by the retirement of M. de Villèle, he kept firm hold of the extreme right benches of the Chamber of Deputies, because no lure had been offered to his ambition by M. de Villèle's successors. Loud, and stormy, and blustering, he was always foremost in creating divisions, in making denunciations, or in calling for measures of vengeance. His heat and indiscretion made him always more dreaded by his own party than by his opponents. He was so bigotedly attached to what he deemed the rights of monarchy and aristocracy, as to be styled the Marat of the Restoration, and to be held capable of adopting, for their promotion, measures as violent as had ever characterized the partisans of popular revolution. His principles were so exaggerated, and his firmness and pertinacity so well known, that he was the last man whom the country would have wished or expected to have seen at the head of the domestic administration. He was supposed to have engaged

to Prince Polignac that he could secure a majority in the Chambers, and yet it was universally said, that even the servile Chamber, by which Villèle had governed, would have been reluctant to support the political bigotry of Labourdonnaye. After the second return of the Bourbons in 1815, he had rendered himself remarkable by his sanguinary demands for retaliation. He had proposed lists of proscriptions which would have given Louis 18th the heads of all the civil and mili-tary functionaries of the hundred days, of all the marshals, ministers, and high dignitaries of the kingdom. The speech which he had delivered on that occasion, and the sanguinary rhetoric of which could scarcely have been surpassed by the worst men of the Convention, was now reprinted, and secured to him a double share of the unpopularity of the ministry of which he was so dangerous a member.

General Bourmont, an able, bold, and ambitious man, unfettered, like most of the French officers, by rigid devotion to any political creed, was odious to the public, and especially to the army at whose head he was now placed, for a very different reason; he had been guilty of that crime which honourable minds can never forgive, treachery in the face of the enemy to a leader who had trusted him. He had begun his career during the Revolution, as an officer in the royalist army of Vendée; but, after the authority of the republic had been established over the west of France, he endeavoured to make his peace with the consular government. He was imprisoned, but made his escape into Portugal, from which he was allowed to return, after the French army had taken possession of the capital. He then entered the Im

perial army; was appointed adjutant-commandant in the army of Naples, and speedily advanced to the rank of general of brigade. In that capacity he served during the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, and Napoleon rewarded his bravery and conduct by making him general of division. On the Restoration, Bourmont was among the foremost to offer his services to the Bourbons. He was appointed to the command of the sixth military division at Besançon. He was there when Napoleon returned from Elba; he sanctioned, at least, by his presence, the proclamation which afterwards occasioned the execution of Ney: he himself solicited permission to be allowed to serve under the usurper; he received the command of a division in the army which marched towards Belgium; and, having been thus trusted, he deserted his post the night before the battle of Waterloo, and joined the allies at Ghent. The command which he afterwards enjoyed in Spain, in the army of occupation, under the duke of Angoulême, had been unable to efface the infamy of his former conduct, aggravated as it was by the universally received fact, that, though he aided in prosecuting Marshal Ney to death, he had himself been an active instrument in seducing him to join Napoleon. All parties had decided upon his character. Prince Polignac discovered too late the error which he had committed in placing so important a department of his government in the hands of a man, who was despised as well as hated. He endeavoured, it was said, to effect a change; but Bourmont was ambitious; he was minister; he was supported by the Angoulême interest; and minister he was determined to remain.

The only name in the new list of ministers calculated to command public regard, was that of admiral de Rigny, appointed to the department of the marine. His personal character conciliated respect; the honours of Navarino had given him popularity, and had identified him with a cause, which, in the Chambers, excited scarcely less interest than the concerns of France herself. But the appointment, judicious and unobjectionable though it was, produced only a new proof of the weakness and nakedness of the Cabinet. The admiral refused to join it; the ministry of the marine went a begging for three weeks, and was given at last to a M. de Haussez, of whom nothing was known but that he believed in the general creed of his colleagues. The king had not intended originally that the change should be so total; and many urgencies were used to prevail on M. Roy to retain the finances; but he refused to separate himself from his colleagues, and insisted on resigning. The example was followed by the whole body of the adherents of the late ministry. The councillors of state sent in their resignations one after another; even the holders of pensions returned the warrants by which they had been granted. Wherever the ministers turned themselves to seek, for the vacancies thus produced, men who might stand well in the public eye, they found all their offers contemned. No man who valued public opinion would cast in his lot with a Cabinet that had been marked with reprobation from its birth, and round which had been drawn a circle of popular odium, within which no man could enter without losing his character. These difficulties

were peculiarly embarrassing in regard to the Prefecture of the police. Under a system of police at once so intimately domestic, and so politically efficacious, as that of France, the spirit of the functionary placed at its head had always been reckoned a striking index of the character of the administration which he served. M. de Belleyme, who held the office under the late ministry, had so conducted himself, as to acquire a large share of public confidence and esteem. The new Cabinet were anxious to retain a popular man in so odious a situation, and when the prefect sent in his resignation, Labourdonnaye wrote to him in the most pressing terms, and, with the most flattering offers, urging him to remain. The prefect continuing obstinate, the influence of the king himself was resorted to; but that, too, proved ineffectual. The office was given to M. Mangin, counsellor in the court of Cassation, and this unfortunate nomination added fuel, if any thing could add, to the flame which threatened to consume Prince Polignac and his colleagues. Mangin was still more obnoxious as a magistrate than the members of the Cabinet were as ministers. As procureur-general of Poitiers, he had conducted the prosecution of general Berton for a conspiracy in 1821. His proceedings on the trial had been violent and partial, not only against the accused, but against distinguished political characters who were opposed to the party in power. He had charged five members of the Chamber of Deputies, among whom were general Foy and M. Lafitte, with being Berton's accomplices; he had described them as veyors for the gibbet," and had expressed his regret at not being VOL. LXXI.

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allowed to prosecute them. The court of Cassation had acquitted him of a charge of irregularity in these proceedings, but had censured him for having used inconsiderate expressions. The elevation to so delicate an office of a man who could abuse his official situation to purposes of such extravagant party spirit, was certainly ill-suited to conciliate any portion of public confidence to the Cabinet which appointed him. But the ministry, deserted and rejected by every man who stood well in the opinion of the people, and feared or despised by all the most valuable classes of society, was compelled to choose within a narrow circle. At the same time, whatever apprehensions might be justified by the nature of the appointment, nothing could be more mild, moderate, and encouraging, than the sentiments put forth by the new prefect in the circular, addressed to the subaltern agents of the police, with which he entered upon his office. "You will find me," he said, "inimical to every thing that is arbitrary. I know what honourable examples my predecessor leaves me; I adopt them. I desire to continue them. You had his confidence-I give you mine. You all retain your employments - the situation of no one will be changed. What I say to you is not mere matter of course; it is my thoughts-my intentions I declare to you. I shall follow frankly the line of my duties; I shall follow it with firmness. I shall endeavour to secure myself from all error: if I mistake, warnings will not be wanting: I shall profit by them, from whatever quarter they may come. A useful warning loses nothing of its importance by being given us by an enemy: an abuse [M]

ought not to be remedied with the less readiness, because it has been pointed out in an offensive manner."

These were excellent professions; but the public was not in a humour to be appeased with professions, and they mitigated in no respect the storm of opposition, which continued to rage with unabated fury. The journals had combined with an unanimity never before witnessed; they were followed, sometimes outstripped, by the violence of the departmental journals. Those which had been formerly ministerial, openly joined the opposition. It had been customary with other cabinets to put forth in the Moniteur a species of manifesto, announcing the principles on which the government was to be conducted; but on the present occasion even the Moniteur was silent, while the multifarious and increasing opponents of the ministry were thus left at liberty to impute to them the worst designs, and all imputations seemed to be confirmed by the apparent acquiescence with which they were received. The dreaded minister of the interior, indeed, made public a circular addressed by him, on his entrance into office, to the prefects of the departments, in which he declared that government had no intention to cause a re-action, and meant to observe strictly the constitutional charter; but the value of these vague declarations was measured by the known principles of the men who made them, and the nature of the measures which they had been selected to resist. The spirit in which the constitutional charter should be administered, and the rights which it recognized and cherished, were precisely the subjects of the question at issue between the court and the country.

It is probable, as the accounts of the time bore, that the king had been deceived as to the control which the new ministry would exercise over the representative body. He was said to have been assured of a majority in the Chambers; and it was only by the unanimity of execration bursting from the public organs of the par ties on whom that majority depended, that the miscalculation was discovered. To gain any thing by a dissolution, in the present excited state of the public mind, was still more hopeless. All the machinery, and management, and influence of Villèle had failed in that attempt two years before; the vacancies, which had since occurred, had been supplied, in almost every instance, by liberal candidates; the very success of the popular party had given them new activity, and boldness, and expertness. While the country, therefore, wished for a dissolution, as a measure, which, by bringing forth an irresistible weight of opinion, would put an end to the ministry, such an appeal to the people was the last expedient to which the ministry could think of having recourse. As the Chambers were not sitting, they might have gained a temporary repose, by establishing a censorship, and imposing silence on the press; but they acted more wisely in concluding, that, as such a step could not fail to confirm the charges, and aggravate the animosity, with which they were attacked, the brief tranquillity it might bestow would only heighten the mischief at last, and that they might promise themselves a more permanent calm by allowing the tempest to rage itself out.

One of their first acts, however, was to direct a prosecution